Accidental Awakening by Jeanette Amlie
Brain Dump by Jeanette Amlie
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I sit by the side of the imaginary patient in the imaginary bed with others around her. I am a family member attending their death. All seems fine and I am playing my role well through the end. But afterward something is beginning to happen to me, or to happen within me.
The class has dispersed now, all but the instructor who is still packing up. I tell her I am experiencing great anxiety within me and I don’t know why. I feel like I am suddenly going to die or go crazy. She stays and talks to me on the balcony for a little while, but honestly, I don’t even remember what she said except that she didn’t really seem to get it. Despite being a counseling teacher who was guiding us in a psycho-drama process meant to re-enact someone’s past experience that had traumatized them, she didn’t seem to get what was happening to me. Later I began to have flashes of a moment of my mother’s death that had remained buried for many years. All it took was that little scenario for it to pop its head up through the concrete slab that I had poured over it. Isn’t it amazing how the tiniest weeds can do that….break through something far more solid and enduring than they are supposed to be! |
That one little repressed memory came up like an earth quake, filling my whole body with shock and terror. I couldn’t help but re-experience it all again, the horror of that time, which was too much for me to feel before. Still, after a year of graduate, art therapy study, I seemed to have no tools to assist me, which baffled me.
Fortune would eventually bring me to a school of the body and one brilliant being whom I later called my Spiritual Trauma Therapist. He knew how the body stores the unprocessed experiences of our early lives and saves them for the time when we are ready to heal them. It is a great survival mechanism, but it sucks when the seismic tremors begin, no matter how much knowledge and preparation we think we have.
Lee Cartwright taught me, in the classroom and on myself, how to begin to tend the cracks and festering boils of my own trauma and conditioning. He knew the science of trauma, but he was a gifted healer and spiritual mentor as well. He taught me to see the ways we have divided ourselves: side to side, top to bottom and front to back. This has been the primary teaching that has stayed with me through the decade following my work with him, through many other teachings and experiences. It is what has married my exploration of numerous forms of trauma therapy, with the non-dual, spiritual teachings that remain my unshakable foundation.
The thing about Lee was that he knew that what I was experiencing was a profound awakening, not just trauma. In fact, the trauma was the very catalyst for the awakening process. And during that time I experienced more amazing visions and phenomena than I ever really thought possible. What a gift he and his work has been for me and I will always remain his greatest admirer, if now from afar.
It isn’t over. The road has had so many twists and turns in it that I hardly remember where I thought it was going anymore. If anything it has taught me to keep surrendering into Grace every time I hit another dead end and get confused and doubtful. Pause, breathe and let go of my expected outcome. Then something always happens to reassure me that I am not crazy… that I did not make this up… that it is not a figment of an overactive imagination. It is still unfolding and I know that I am held in Grace through it all.
Fortune would eventually bring me to a school of the body and one brilliant being whom I later called my Spiritual Trauma Therapist. He knew how the body stores the unprocessed experiences of our early lives and saves them for the time when we are ready to heal them. It is a great survival mechanism, but it sucks when the seismic tremors begin, no matter how much knowledge and preparation we think we have.
Lee Cartwright taught me, in the classroom and on myself, how to begin to tend the cracks and festering boils of my own trauma and conditioning. He knew the science of trauma, but he was a gifted healer and spiritual mentor as well. He taught me to see the ways we have divided ourselves: side to side, top to bottom and front to back. This has been the primary teaching that has stayed with me through the decade following my work with him, through many other teachings and experiences. It is what has married my exploration of numerous forms of trauma therapy, with the non-dual, spiritual teachings that remain my unshakable foundation.
The thing about Lee was that he knew that what I was experiencing was a profound awakening, not just trauma. In fact, the trauma was the very catalyst for the awakening process. And during that time I experienced more amazing visions and phenomena than I ever really thought possible. What a gift he and his work has been for me and I will always remain his greatest admirer, if now from afar.
It isn’t over. The road has had so many twists and turns in it that I hardly remember where I thought it was going anymore. If anything it has taught me to keep surrendering into Grace every time I hit another dead end and get confused and doubtful. Pause, breathe and let go of my expected outcome. Then something always happens to reassure me that I am not crazy… that I did not make this up… that it is not a figment of an overactive imagination. It is still unfolding and I know that I am held in Grace through it all.